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The cafeteria's on the Microsoft campus are pretty decent most of the time. Sometimes the lines can take a while, so I usually choose where I eat based on that. Today I went early so I chose The Pasta ya Gotcha, who's lines can get slow. I usually order the Texas Tijuana Taco Penne or just Taco Penne for short. It's pretty good, it's easy for them to make, and they sell a lot of it. Instead of ordering the Taco Penne, I decided to give the Penne Puttanesca a try.

For those of you who don't know, Puttanesca is basically a tomato sauce. So I go up to the counter and give the girl my order, but being an English speaking person, I had a hard time with the pronunciation. I can't really spell out what I sounded like but it was roughly, "putschensciahss." I expected the girl to laugh at my bad pronunciation, correct me, and then make it. Instead she stared at me blankly. So, I tried saying it more clearly, basically enunciating each of the letters, "Putt…

Last week, I found this site carbonfund.com. It's basically a site that will take your money and use it to reduce carbon in the atmosphere.

The thing with these companies, is they tell you they are supporting projects that offset the carbon we spit out into the air, but if you read through the sites, they never really provide details as to how they are doing that. They just say, the money goes into replanting forests, and building wind towers. But are they really? Do they have pictures of people out planting trees? And where are these tress being planted? Because when I drive down the streets, I see a lot of trees being chopped down for new housing developments. And why do they need to support building wind towers, the government already offests that cost through tax incentives to companies that build them.

This carbon fund site, has a blog posting offering to sell people post cards, talking about the great work they do, and promoting global warming awareness. I decided to leave a c…

I occasionally volunteer down at Seattle's Center for Wooden Boats. This last weekend I was down there for the grand opening (if you could call it that) of the newly added 52.1 million dollar, South Lake Union Streetcar, or South Lake Union Trolley, aka SLUT.

For those of you who aren't local or up to date, Seattle has decided to solve some of it's transit problems by building a street car that runs a little over 2 miles, from no place to no place. What ever happened to being able to walk? I walk 1 to 2 miles every day after work with the dog. Yet, people in downtown can't walk a mile or two? Not only that, but this street car, is totally in the way. It has made it a pain in the ass to park down at the boat center. Street cars block traffic, and actually cost more to operate then buses. So why are we building this? Because we live in Seattle, and there is a reason we have the worst traffic in the country, because the people who make these decisions are fucking retards…

10. Environmentalist throw out their beliefs with the trash - Read my posting on Christmas Garbage.9. We spend money on pointless crap that usually get's forgotten about, broken , or lost by next Christmas - "In 2006, the average US household is expected to spend about $1,700 on Christmas and holiday spendings" according to a report in the economist. Maybe if people weren't so obsessed with belongings, they could just sit back and enjoy spending time with family, instead of crying about wanting the latest game for their Xbox or PlayStation. Such as the new ACE COMBAT 6: Fires of Liberation game for my Xbox 360 that is out right now.8. Speaking of air travel - Holidays are the busiest time of the year for air travel, which equals longer wait times, delayed flights, and other travel hassle. Yet we all jus…

Another nut by the name of Matthew Murray went on a shooting spree in Colorado, going after people in a local church. But instead of reading about a huge number of dead, we get to read about a couple of bad asses. The first is Larry Bourbannais. According to the story as told by him, he was wounded in an attempt to confront the guy. He didn't have a weapon but as a former Vietnam vet, he wasn't afraid of a little gun fire. When the shooting started he ran to the room to where the guy was at, and found a cowardly security guard, who was armed but not returning fire. Bourbannais did try to get the guard to hand over his weapon but the guard wouldn't do it. Personally I think Bourbannais should have bitch slapped the guard and taken the weapon, but he didn't need to because Jeanne Assam a former police officer was there, gun drawn, and ready to use it. And God was with her, because she calmly identified herself, then shot the mother fucker.

The break room counter in my office, has to the right a water cooler/heater. It's typical of most break rooms. It has a hot, room temp, and cold. Just to the right of that, is a stack of styrofoam cups. There is also a stack off to the left of the counter near the teas.

So, I'm at the water filling my mug with a little hot water to rinse it out. As I'm standing there, a guy, a good two feet taller then me comes into the room, and reaches over me to grab one of the styrofoam cups. Keep in mind he could have went to the other stack, but it would have involved taking an additional two steps to get to. In the process of grabbing the cup, he elbows me on the side of the head. It wasn't hard, but still he did it, and it was rude. He could have waited two second for me to finish, or like I said, grab a cup from the other stack. But what really pissed me off is, he didn't do what most of us would do, which is immediately apologize. So of course irritated I was like "Ex…

the Seattle PI had an article yesterday, about the recent rain storm we had in Western Washington, and about I-5 being closed down. In the article they mentioned in order to raise the interstate through that area, so it doesn't happen again, the estimate is around 300 to 400 million dollars. And we all know, with the way the government works, if they actually do it, it will end up costing twice as much by the time it's done. Oh, and keep in mind, it's not like that money will go toward preventing any of the homes from getting flooded, only raising the highway, so we can drive past and look at the flooded houses.

Are they seriously thinking about spending nearly half a billion dollars to raise a road that might flood once in a lifetime. And the result of not raising the road is, that people will have to spend twice as long as they normally would driving from Seattle to Portland. Big freaken deal people, so it flooded. It happened, it might happen again, lets accept it, wait …

On the drive into work this morning, I was listing to a talk show and they were having a pretty heated debate on if we should build a wall to block off Mexico and the U.S. I'm sure we've all heard the arguments, so I'm not going to get into that. What I'd actually like to do is propose an alternative to the wall.

Instead of building a wall or even a fence we build towers. On the top of each of these towers we have snipers, and their job is to shoot anyone who tries to cross the border. We'll put up some signs, in both Spanish and English, letting them know attempted crossings will end it death. But, we will also allow anyone who makes it through to become an instant U.S. citizen.

There are a lot of advantages to this idea. First, it will greatly reduce the number of people trying to cross the border. Once the word is out, my guess is fewer people will try. Second, We will reduce the cost of border management. We won't have to spend the money on the cost of build…